The Aesthetics of American Apocalypse:

Emotional Management of the Sum of All Fears

Crew of the USS Tom Clancy;

Thank you for your patience over the last couple of months as work and school obligations kept me from producing as many dispatches for “The Hunt for Tom Clancy” as I would’ve liked. One more paper to go and I will have my first year of graduate school in the books, its really been a wonderful year and I again want to express my appreciation to long term Hunt For Tom Clancy readers for getting me here; I wouldn’t have even thought to apply to school again if I hadn’t gone up to DC to do this story:

And I wouldn’t have done that story if not for you all being such amazing readers and friends, so thank you again. Writing The Hunt for Tom Clancy has improved my life immeasurably, and all of that comes because people like you take time and spend money to read my writing. I really, really, really have a lot of gratitude in my heart.

I’ve got gratitude on my heart and nuclear weapons on my mind, so let's dive right in to the first dispatch of may, which is an adaptation of a paper I wrote for a class on Aesthetics and Politics that I think you might enjoy. Thank you again for reading, please tell your friends.

Matt

The Aesthetics of the American Apocalypse is an umbrella term I use to describe the design, branding, function and ultimate effectiveness of two American Continuity of Government sites built in the late 1950’s—both of which are still capable of operation today. Continuity of Government programs—contingency plans and preparations for the American Government’s functioning after a nuclear war—started under Presidents Truman and Eisenhower. These programs continue to this day. This paper explores the particular aesthetics of top down American doomsday culture after World War II as it applied to the physical world. The paper also considers the effect those aesthetics were intended to produce for two audiences, domestic and foreign. The domestic audience can be further subdivided to the American public and the American leadership; the foreign audience was concerned with the leadership of rival nations (primarily the Soviet Union and China) that also had nuclear weapons. This was a broad portfolio, encompassing everything from the look and feel two American fallout bunkers—the Congressional shelter underneath the Greenbrier Hotel in West Virginia, and the military’s command and control node beneath Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado, the look and feel of Strategic Air Command Culture, to the prose and iconography used in Civil Defense materials.

Take a key image such as the “Red Phone.” This is a popular culture icon that symbolized the American-Russian communication link to be used by executives in times of crisis (used in films such Fail Safe and Dr. Strangelove, Novels like Red Alert, and in both 1984 and 2008 American presidential political advertising)—that in reality was not even a phone link, simply a teletype machine. A red phone of the same type was used in the television series “Batman” as the link between billionaire vigilante Bruce Wayne, also known as Batman, and the civic leadership of Gotham City embodied by Commissioner James Gordon. It may sound silly, but having the exact same phone, of the exact same color used in all of these cultural products—necessarily calling attention to itself in all of the representations in media—produces, over time, a desired effect, linking the Red Phone with authority and crisis management.  

As Dr. Strangelove correctly notes in Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece film of the same name: "The whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost, if you keep it a secret!” For the wielders of the doomsday power, the problem becomes a mental one, rather than a strictly military one. How best, then, to communicate the mixed message that a weapon exists that is so powerful it could destroy the earth but don’t panic? The authorities of the day responded with what historian Guy Oakes called “emotional management” in “The Imaginary War: Civil Defense and the American Cold War Culture.” This was a nod to British Historian Jonathan Hogg’s use of the term to signify efforts to “persuade and cajole British people into positive ways of thinking and acting in response to future nuclear threats.” (Wills, 396)

A doomsday weapon is not much of a deterrent if the public doesn’t know about; however, balance in that knowledge  is critical. If the public does know about it, they might fear it so much that society fails to function. The key, military and civilian planners determined in the early Atomic Era, was to balance these fears with preparations for parts of the citizenry (although mostly the government) to outlive catastrophe. That’s why, in addition to red-phones and civil defense pamphlets, bunkers—both collective and individual—were necessary.